DS9: The Visitor

         I had forgotten that DS9 had some straight up alternate future timeline episodes, and I am really impressed with this one. It starts off in what we soon learn is the future but tells most of its story through flashbacks to events that are still in the future relative to where the story is now. It also early on sets up the idea that Sisko was killed in what is currently the present of the show and that this had a ripple effect not just on Jake but on the fate of Starfleet. By ending with the erasing of the events of the story it also avoids any problems with events in the future of the show and other series not lining up with how we remember then. 
         The episode opens on a stormy evening in the bayou. A now aged Jake takes some sort of injection and is surprised by a knock on his door. It is a young fan of his writing and she wants to know why he stopped writing after his first novel and collection of short stories. He explains that any other time he wouldn't tell her the story, but today is the right time for it. In a flashback we see Jake getting talked into a trip to the gamma quadrant with his father on the Defiant. He is busy writing and doesn't want to leave his quarters. Ben comes to his quarters and convinces him to come to the bridge but before he can something happens in engineering. Ignoring his fathers instructions Jake follows him to engineering where the warp core is about to explode. They stop it just in time but there is a discharge from the engine that seems to kill Jake's father right before his eyes. But he isn't dead and starts appearing every few weeks to months around the station.
         Jake refused to leave the station but things got so bad the Klingons took over and he was forced to leave for earth. He became a writer and got married but his father appeared again and it drove him to find a way to save him. He sacrificed his marriage and most of his life working on a plan but everything he tried never worked. He would get to spend a few minutes with his father who wasn't aging but then he would be gone. Eventually Jake figured out the only way to save him was to die while they were together which is what was happening in the very beginning of the episode. The young writer leaves and Ben appears and can't believe Jake would kill himself to save him. But it works and Ben dodges the discharge and we are back to the present with both Sisko's alive and well.

         Review: A very touching episode about father and son and the lengths they will go to for each other. A standalone episode that tells a lot about the characters of both Jake and his father.

8 out of 10